James Hunter cut a novel figure at the High Sierra Music Festival this past 4th of July weekend. The British guitar-playing soul singer took the stage in a stylishly cut gray suit, his hair brushed into a neat pompadour that 50 years ago would have swept back into a ducktail.

He and his superb supporting band — on Hammond organ, upright bass, drums and tenor and baritone saxophones — rocked through a set of Jackie Wilson-, Ray Charles-, Sam Cooke- and Ben E. King-influenced original songs, covered a pair of early '50s classics by the "5" Royales and turned the sweltering Vaudeville Tent into a barefoot sock hop.

A couple of hundred tie-dyed revelers, most of whom had trekked to Quincy, Calif., to hear such jam-band-circuit favorites as Bob Weir and Ratdog, Gov't Mule and Spearhead, bopped around like they were at a Dick Clark dance party.

Hunter, a 45-year-old former railway worker originally from Colchester, Essex, England, has been sparking such time warps and cultural dislocations with increasing frequency for the past two years, since the release of his Grammy-nominated U.S. debut, "People Gonna Talk." NPR feature profiles, late-night TV appearances and music-press raves have fueled the buzz that propels Hunter into Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco this Friday, July 11.

But more than hype helped Hunter's new CD, "The Hard Way" (Hear Music/Go Records) open at No. 1 on the Billboard blues chart in June. The music is an irresistibly danceable throwback to the 1950s when such labels as King, Specialty and Atlantic churned out the jump blues, R&B and early soul that provided the foundation for rock 'n' roll. Hunter writes original songs that draw on all the styles he originally stumbled upon in a stash of 78 rpm records given to him by his grandmother, and he sings them in powerful tenor punctuated by staccato trills, yelps and a spine-tingling falsetto.

Before launching his current U.S. tour, in a phone from his home in Ealing, West London, Hunter talked at length about his musical influences, finding his own voice as a singer and songwriter, the source of his idiosyncratic electric solos and successfully recruiting legendary New Orleans pianist and songwriter Allen Toussaint to play on two tracks of "The Hard Way." He peppered the conversation with jokes and more than a few belly laughs.

DR: How did you manage to get Allen Toussaint to perform on the new record?

JH: We asked him very nicely. We were surprised he agreed to do it, actually. He'd gone on record saying how much he enjoyed us when he saw us play, and we thought, well, he'd be a good bloke to ask, especially because he practically invented the style I sort of play in. Kyle [Koehler], our regular bloke, of course we threw him out of the studio when Toussaint came in — would you go have a cup of tea, Kyle?

DR: What was it that caught your ear when you first heard those old records your grandmother gave you?

JH: I think exuberance and directness. It was the kind of music that didn't have that smug knowingness, which I think is perfectly acceptable as a personal trait, but it doesn't work in music for me. Directness and simplicity in getting it across is the approach I like, rather than hedging around things.

DR: What had you been listening to before that?

JH: The stuff that was prevalent when I was about 10 years old was what was called glam-rock. Actually, the stuff I always reacted against was what was laughingly called progressive rock. I thought at the time, and still do, that those two terms are mutually exclusive — that's if you want to be any good. [Laughs.] I used to have fights with me brother, who was kind of in favor of some of that stuff. Calling any music progressive kind of implies that everything else is retrogressive.

DR: When did you start singing blues and R&B?

JH: It took me a while. I was about 10 when I heard it, and it then took about another 10 years before I started to doing it. I had to wait for me voice to break, you see.

DR: Now you have to break it again to get up into that high falsetto.

JH: I've got an appliance to help me with that. It's called a "tenor's friend." It's a truss with a spike attached. [Laughs.] I stole that joke from Spike Milligan.

DR: Here in the U.S., records by Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Ben E. King and Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters are played on "oldies" stations.

JH: Yeah, some of that was almost considered mainstream in the States, I suppose. Whereas over here, people like Clyde McPhatter have always had more of an underground cult status. He never hit the charts over here, you see. If I mention "Such a Night" to me mum, me mum immediately thinks Johnnie Ray. All these people like the "5" Royales and Clyde McPhatter, they didn't make so much as a splash over here, so their stuff isn't regarded as "what used to be." I was talking with Allen Toussaint, and he was really surprised that we'd heard of the "5" Royales. He said that even in the late '50s it was only ultra-hip black people that had heard of them. We definitely got brownie points off him for that. So I started throwing a lot of names around, like [New Orleans guitarist] Edgar Blanchard, and he'd say, "You've heard of him?"

DR: Did you become a vinyl hound, hanging out with other collectors and scouring through bins for old records?

JH: When I worked on the railway, I worked in the signals department, and there was a fellow who worked on the platform as something somewhere between a guard and porter. He was an absolute fanatic on that stuff, and we'd sort of race each other to the record shop in time for the latest re-release. A couple of bootleg companies, who shall go nameless, used to put this stuff out. I had no idea of this at the time, but it's kind of galling to realize that all those black guys had been ripped off for a second time.

DR: Were you writing your own songs when you started performing?

JH: I did start writing me own songs, but it was kind of half and half. Earlier it was less than that. We were doing mostly covers, trying to avoid the really obvious ones. You'd never have caught us singing "Sweet Home Chicago" or anything like that. We did throw in a couple of slightly obscurer ones. We used to do "Something on Your Mind" by Big Jay McNeely. We used to try and mix things up. We had a wonderful concept where we used to do the theme song from an Australian soap opera called "Neighbors" — we used to play it as if it were a Guitar Slim track, and that used to fool people.

DR: Do you remember the first original you wrote?

JH: It was a kind of pastiche Muddy Waters thing. It was called "Evil Eye." That was also me first recording for a compilation ["Dance To It"] that was being done in London [in 1984]. The prerequisite for being on this album was that you had to submit an original song. That prompted me to write something. I almost re-recorded it but the other lads thought it was a bit too pastiche-y, and I do listen to them, from time to time. [Laughs.]

DR: When did you find you own voice in this genre?

JH: Several times, actually. I think the last time was when I hit a financial low point and I had to go out busking, about five years ago, and I had to play quite hard to get people to hear me, and suddenly I found that me playing and me singing had sort of reached another level. I thought, hey, I'm getting better at this. But there have been various stages before that, and I think maybe the first time was the first time I had the nerve to get up in front of people and do it, which would have been when I was about 22.

DR: You were 24 when you released your first album [as Howlin' Wilf and the Veejays] in 1986. Was there an audience for what you were doing?

JH: We were very well received. When I first moved to London, there was a bunch of us used to go busking. There was a couple, she used to play guitar and he would play double bass. I'd turn up from Colchester and stay with them overnight, we'd rehearse a bunch of songs and then go out and busk 'em on the street around Camden Town. We'd get quite a crowd around us and then we'd get invited to play indoors at places. We did a TV appearance within about a year of me sort of starting to go at London. Quite a big following. About five years later it all started to fizzle out, and I was still grabbing gigs whenever I could.

DR:Your first album under your own name [1996's "... Believe What I Say"], featured Van Morrison on two tracks, and you had toured with him earlier. I remember seeing you with Van at the Masonic Auditorium in the show that became the album "A Night in San Francisco." How did you hook up?

JH: We ran into him when we played at a place in Newport, South Wales — King's Hotel. The proprietor was the same bloke who used to promote the gigs there, and he was an old mate of Van's. When we arrived, he said, "Van's here." I didn't know what he was talking about, so I said, "Oh, good, park it around the back." [Laughs.] I didn't realize he was talking about Van Morrison until we'd come off stage and we met him. We sat and chatted over a cup of tea and talked about music — Bobby Bland, Jerry Lee Lewis. A year after that, I ended up doing a few gigs with him.

DR: Given Van's reputation, from the outside it seems like that could be a strange gig.

JH: It looked pretty weird from the inside, as well. You know what people say about him, but he was the normalest part of it. There were some right weirdos in the entourage, though, I'll tell you that. [Laughs.]

DR: You don't take a lot guitar solos on the new album, but when you do, they're really distinctive in their phrasing.

JH: They are quite strange, aren't they? They're a bit quirky. I try to make a virtue out of the limitations, because I can't do these great long sustained notes and these big epic solos, so I just do these really terse, weird little figures. Because of what I can't do, I try and do something different.

DR: Did you have guitar-playing role models?

JH:Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Lowman Pauling of the "5" Royales, he was definitely one of the ones for me. I liked him as a songwriter as well. In the blues realm, there's a lot of that "quest for authenticity" that I think ultimately kills music off. All that virtuosity becomes about something else, whereas in its best form, that music was just sort of groovy music for people to jump about to, and that's all it should be about. People want to see it as a higher art form, but I think holding to that level of reverence would ultimately kill it off. When people say, "Oh, well, you've studied it," I say I've never studied anything in me life. I think when you make it too much of an academic exercise it's slightly missing the point. It sounds like I'm having an unbehaved go at Eric Clapton, but far be it from me. [Laughs.]

DR:Roots-music seems to experience a revival every couple of decades or so. In the early 1980s here we had the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Robert Gordon, Robert Cray, Delbert McClinton getting new boost in his career.

JH: All the best music isn't stuck in one time frame. It carries on. But who knows? Maybe I'll invent something.

DR: How would you say your music has changed in recent years?

JH: I think the songwriting is starting to get a little bit broader in its subject matter. There's only so many times you can get away with yapping on about some bird who's left you or whatever, especially after you get married and you get on quite well, you know? I sometimes ask me wife if she'll do something to piss me off so I can have grist for the mill, but she won't do it, which pisses me off.

On his way to the Hear & Now, Oakland native Derk Richardson nearly finished his Ph.D. in history, wrote a guidebook to Thailand, jerked sodas at Ozzie's in Berkeley and taught scuba for underwater scientific research. He has written about music since 1978 and is host of "The Hear & Now," a free-form music show (every Thursday, 10 p.m.-midnight) on KPFA 94.1 FM.